Human nature, he decreed, need not be dishonest or dishonorable; let us throw off this old-church myth, this pew-filler, that men are by their very substance evil and undependable. Having said his say he daily marched into the humanities and acted with a good deal less than integrity complete. Like a very ass. Still he believed it. The truth shall make ye free. Still he cried out that men are born for freedom. And he died, a prophet without particular honor in the home town of himself. He shouted: Forever learn the new Down with everything as is Seek God beyond his Holy Names Behold yourself (Intellectual, critic, philosopher, preacher) The while, he beheld but morsels of himself, and--like other men--admired them as if they were the fabric of reality and not the gingerly scissored swatches of one awareness. Well, go away now, Wylie. It is the time, as you so intellectually predicted, for an improved you or a better somebody to take over the problem. Good night, sweet hypocrite. Dauntless disappointment. Oaf. Of course, I argued with myself against self-condemnation. I am a contemporary man, I insisted. Too conditioned by father and mother, school, church, America, the common law, and this and that, and you, and you, to expect in a single lifetime (not too long, either) that I could, by whatever authenticity of effort, penetrate thousands, thousands, thousands of years of the unpenetrated stuff in my superego and discover the true whole of me beyond: the conveniently overlooked, the misrepresented, the tabooed, the forgotten, the unfrocked, the submerged structure of humanity itself. And I argued: Even if I did this, it would be nothing. What I said was reason, they would say was sacrilege. What I said was love, they would call obscene. What I said was truth, they would call nonsense. My hope would bring them but despair. My laughter would wring their panicky tears. My God would also be their Devil. And some of my ideals would seem un-American. They would call my route to understanding a blind labyrinth. Their scientists would find me emotional. Their priests--cold, analytical, and heartless. Every instinct of my society would belabor me whenever I pointed out its valid opposite. And when I said, These are but local, temporal contradictions--seen together, they can be transcended, understood, contained by a man who rises above them to look down upon them, or by a man who shoulders them, why!!! All who live by the exploitation of one side of any paradox, all the mighty engineers and all the honored men of God, would jump at me. And they would finally corner me somewhere, breaking my own rules.